Sometimes It Is Hard To Be Me

"Sometimes it's hard to be me." Ever catch yourself thinking something like that, usually at the end of a rough day when it feels like you accomplished nothing and a handful of things went sideways? I floated the line past a few people recently, and they couldn't argue with it.

If you're the type who keeps holding yourself to a particular standard, piling up goal after goal, and saying yes to more responsibilities than any one person can carry, that feeling tends to show up a lot.

Back when I was seeing people for counseling, I often nudged them toward smaller goals, the kind you can actually keep in view. The method is pretty plain. Give yourself a set amount of time to spend on a problem, and when the time runs out, move along to the next thing. Or decide which piece of the problem you'll tackle, finish that piece, and only then move on.

And when the day shows you that a goal simply isn't reachable right now, change it. Refusing to adjust is just handing yourself a failure. People need to feel they've gotten somewhere, so if you look back and see that the goals you picked were never reasonable, ease up on yourself.

I'll give you one of my own examples. While I was studying for my psychology licensing exam, I assigned myself a number of pages to get through each weekday. Hit the target, and the weekend was mine, no makeup work for anything I'd skipped during the week. This was also right when I was trying to balance being a new farm wife with being a brand-new psychologist, so the weekends mattered.

One more thing to tuck in your back pocket while all this is going on: say to yourself, "Take good care of yourself. You belong to me." Did you catch that? That's "you" talking to "you."

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